Andrea La Nauze

I'm an environmental economist, which means that I use data and the tools of economics to understand the causes of environmental problems and to think about policy solutions.

tiny little particles in the air that are a diameter that is less than 2.5 micrometers.

So it's more than 100 times thinner than a human hair.

And those particles can come from natural sources like dust and smoke, but also from things like the combustion of fossil fuels.

So that's one of the most concerning forms of air pollution.

The interest in economics is fundamentally about the productivity impacts.

And so part of the reason we're interested in cognition is that if cognition affects productivity, then the costs of exposure to air pollution may be much, much larger than we had previously estimated.

And as Linos tells us, there are a number of papers that all point in the same direction in that it does appear that there are cognitive impacts of exposure to high levels of air pollution.

I had been reading the literature on the effects of air pollution on productivity, but also other behaviors, for example, crime.

And knowing that a leading hypothesis for those effects was really this cognitive impact that

So there's a literature showing that the test scores of high school students is negatively impacted by exposure to particulate matter.

But we didn't at that stage have much evidence for the cognitive effects in adults.

And that makes sense because we don't regularly sit high school exams every year as adults.

Yeah, who said economics isn't fun?

They're able to compare quality of umpires' decisions on days of high pollution exposure and low pollution exposure.

That's a really important paper.

It demonstrates that there is an impact on performance of really highly skilled professionals.

But it is a study of a group of individuals that are probably fairly similar doing one task, an important task for one specific task.

I had recently been exposed to some advertising by Lumosity and suddenly thought, wow, well, there's a company that is claiming to test the cognitive ability of lots of adults across the United States.

They have something called the Human Cognition Project, where researchers can apply to either use their data or to use their platform to undertake other tests.